They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election.
If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for? The more complex the world gets the more pointless all this superficial gimmickry looks.
Just look at the budgets thrown at these agencies. Its frankly sickening.
Your first assumption is that any of those actions were against the ethos of the ones in charge of this technology. They aren't there to stop the bad guys. If anything, the bad guys winning some of the time helps provide public support for the endeavors of those behind this technology. Consider how the people in charge of this technology either gain or lose from the actions of the people you want monitored, compared to what they have to gain or lose from the actions of others who they could use this technology to monitor.
In my personal view, MLK Jr., after his turn to focus on the plight of the poor, is far more a schema of the intended target of this type of technology than James Earl Ray.
They weren't snoring of course, there's no shortage of evidence showing foreknowledge about 9/11 that was consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then (only half-successfully) covered up afterwards.
The real issue was identified in the first few years after 9/11 - disparate patchwork of teams overzealously enforcing moats around their intel/data.
Actually read the report, or at least skim it starting from page 254. What you're saying is just not true.
Specifically, which part(s) of the report are you refuting? Please provide pages and paragraphs #s or quotes.
No doubt someone is screaming that yesterday an attack was going to go on in X country.
And "consciously" is a very loaded word.
The most recent example of your argument was the death of Jamal Khashoggi. The Washington Post reported that the CIA had advance notice of the attack.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudis-lay-in-wait-for-...
The problem of course is because of the secret nature of their budgets, spending, successes, and failures, it's hard to know how good or bad they are for the country.
But there comes a time when we get real victories, even if they aren't revealed for decades. And the victories that happened this decade, may not be revealed for another two or more decades from now.
The possibilities are now open to detect presence behind doors or to shoot people deeply embedded in buildings.
And when every department is granularly information insulated, it's easy for an individual to get caught in a task that serves the above while not even realizing.
What they have is a monopoly on hacking without consequence, and infinite budget to explore every vector in hardware, software and physics to exploit, for no particular reason for no discernable threat aside from "that agency over there is also doing it, maybe", and assuming that is a threat.
Ouch. All apparently true, but ouch.
This kind of things won't change until major national security incidents cause budget cuts, not budget increases. It should be like the private sector. When you repeatedly F things up, you make less and not more.
The counter-argument will be "but you're hobbling our intelligence!" Okay, then create a competing intelligence agency to the CIA/NSA/etc. and give the budget to the one producing results.
The replies to this post completely dismiss the elephant in the room.
It seems that YouTube's censorship algorithms finally stopped blocking it: search YouTube for the 5 hour long DVD series "The New Pearl Harbor ~ full" (dWUzfJGmt5U if it becomes unlisted)
We will be tracked 24/7 by our gait and shape and facial recognition with handoffs between drones and tiny street level cameras, or perhaps to make things easier we may just be tagged eventually with a non invasive RF sensor or coating. Metadata of who you visited or interacted with will be analyzed for patterns with machine learning. Items you order will be tagged and possibly interdicted as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do so. People won’t be able to organize anything dangerous because the state (which at that time will be 99% just AI) will already have predicted that the same way AlphaGo would predict any chess combination. Any uprising will be pre emptively quelled using pinpoint nanobots which were deposited to lie dormant in everyone’s bodies until activated. States will endure forever.
Speaking of those nanobots, once you have them in people’s bodies they can report back all your whereabouts and activities. It’s easy enough to get them in via people’s food and water supply.
The main hiccups will be in the early years as the nanobot swarms are still clumsy and may reveal themselves before they learn how to stay in an organism without getting washed out so easily and without triggering an immune response.
Nanotech is so far away from this capability that it's pretty pointless to worry about.
Not technically advanced. It was using a collection of 0-day exploits to get into a PC via a USB drive. Any basic hacker could accomplish that with existing exploit tooling.
What was so advanced about it was the coordination to enable it. The collection of 0-day exploits, the knowledge of the architecture of the centrifuge, and the engineering expertise to compromise the centrifuges in a non-obvious way.
Stuxnet was incredibly simple technologically, but it was distilled down to exactly what it needed to do and delivered to just the right people by an advanced vast intelligence apparatus. It did not depend on any breakthroughs in signals, encoding, hardware, etc. I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Operation
[1]: https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secu...
Stuxnet has been analyzed in detail and there were no new special hacking techniques like unknown ASLR vulnerabilities or arbitrary unprivileged memory reads like spectre. It was just some 0-days wrapped up with a laser focused task that took years of effort to research.
It's shockingly impressive how much effort went into researching what needed to be done, not the actual mechanism thag was used to do it.
If someone plans out a super elaborate assassination of the hardest target in the world and completes it with a homemade shiv, you don't comment on how impressive the shiv itself was. It was the ability to know when/where/how that was impressive.
The target was interesting and the attack subtle, but attacks on industrial control systems had been the target of research even in the public in the same time frame: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/26/power.at.risk/
Never suggested it was. My point still stands that the world was shocked it existed, if only for precisely the reasons you described. It was an indicator of the degree to which intelligence agencies had their shit together at the time. Things that advanced had never really been publicly seen nor pulled off before.
As an aside, one can likewise argue that imaging people via RF isn't really a breakthrough unto itself, but merely putting existing technology and knowledge together in a complicated but exacting fashion.
When it comes to seeing through walls, these are new techniques. It's not about knowing the right target through intelligence gathering, etc. It requires new state of the art methods not already available to the public.
> presumably disgruntled anonymous user
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not disgruntled at all. I'm pointing out that it was not a technological breakthrough in any regard so it's wrong to identify it as one.
If someone unexpectedly accumulates the largest amount of gold in the world, it's impressive, but it's not a breakthrough in gold-mining technology.
It's not much of a stretch to imagine that intelligence agencies have been heavily invested in this area and are far ahead of public research, given signals intelligence has basically been their bread and butter since forever. Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world.
Keystrokes can be captured indirectly via audio analysis, electromagnetic emissions from wiring, and now RF imaging techniques looking at finger movements. Wouldn't be surprised if they can create multi-modal composite models to attain higher accuracy, or if RF imaging is able to capture lip/jaw movements these days.
The really sexy part is probably what they're able to do with fixed wing airborne platforms, where you can afford to pack ridiculously high-end sensors and local computing power on board.
It still weirds me out to think that a gimmick from 2008's The Dark Knight is more or less a reality now, or will be soon if it already isn't.